RESUMEN
Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer composite (CFRP) is widely used in the aerospace industry, but is prone to delamination, which is a major causes of failure. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems need to be developed to determine the damage occurring within it. Our motivation is to design cost-effective new sensors and a data acquisition system for magnetostrictive structural health monitoring of aerospace composites using a simple RLC circuit. The developed system is tested on magnetostrictive FeSiB and CoSiB actuator ribbons using a bending rig. Our results show detectable sensitivity of inductors as low as 0.6 µH for a bending rig radii between 600 to 300 mm (equivalent to 0.8 to 1.7 mStrain), which show a strain sensitivity resolution of 0.01 µStrain (surface area: ~36 mm2). This value is at the detectability limit of our fabricated system. The best resolution (1.86 µStrain) was obtained from a 70-turn copper (~64 µH) wire inductor (surface area: ~400 mm2) that was paired with a FeSiB actuator.
